In 1980, a small group of friends started People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Back then, no one had heard of "animal rights." Today, people remain confused as to what the term means, but
they DO know that how we treat animals is important. Acknowledging animals' rights
can be as simple as respecting their needs. Of course, animals don't need complex
rights, like the right to drive or the right to vote-although considering the
mess we sometimes make of our elections, perhaps that's not such a bad idea.

Animals enjoy the natural world without ruining it. All they
need is to be able to take a drink of clean water, to be nourished, to have shelter
from extreme weather, and to be left in peace. It isn't much to ask. Yet, today,
few animals have those vital things. The reason they don't have them is because
human beings dominate the world and, to put it bluntly, enslave animals. That
may sound harsh, but think about it. If allowed to be themselves, animals are
self-sufficient, whole, and vital. They raise their own young competently, make
a home in the earth, on a riverbank, or in a tree, sharing that small space with
at least 40 other species, from raccoons and frogs to birds and insects. Animals
don't despoil the waterways or woods, as humans do with our poptop bottles and
plastic bags, and, far worse, with the hog and chicken waste from our intensive
farming systems. The Alaskan wilderness, which is often described as "uninhabited"
and "unspoiled," has, in fact, always been heavily inhabited-by billions of animals
who have kept it pristine.

Although animals have wants and needs and behaviors of their
own, they are often treated as nothing more than hamburgers, handbags, living
test tubes, cheap burglar alarms, or amusements for human beings. They are not
allowed to live their lives, but instead are forced to serve us, giving us carriage
rides, performing silly tricks, and having their skin used for clothing. We use
their flesh as food, despite knowing that we can eat far healthier food, and they
are the surrogate tasters of our poisons.

I was inspired to form People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
after reading a book called Animal Liberation, written by the philosopher Peter
Singer. Dr. Singer suggests that instead of just being just kind to animals, which
everyone knows one should be, we might try viewing animals as individuals like
ourselves, as members of other cultures or, indeed, other nations-perhaps nations
with languages we don't understand, but with rituals and behaviors similar to
our own. After all, animals are not inanimate objects; they are feeling beings
who experience love and joy, loneliness and fear, in much, if not exactly, the
same way we do. Although we have set ourselves up as gods who can do anything
we please simply because we please, biologically we are but one animal among many.
Many anthropologists believe that we have miscategorized ourselves as a separate
class of animal (hominids) out of pure conceit, for now that we have unraveled
the human genome, we see that we share 99 percent of our DNA with other primates.
When we think about it, perhaps all that keeps us from treating the other animals
with respect-the ultimate respect being to leave them in peace to do what they
wish to do-is simple prejudice.

Human beings have a sorry history of prejudice. Through the
ages, our feelings of superiority have caused us to denigrate and abuse others
we have felt were somehow less important or less intelligent than ourselves, instead
of exercising magnanimity and protecting them. While we teach our children the
Golden Rule of "Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You," insist that
"Might Does Not Make Right," and pronounce that it is wrong to discriminate on
the basis of an arbitrary difference, like race or physical ability, somehow we
continue to try to justify hurting, and even killing, other sentient beings, simply
because we can get away with it. Our rationale is that they are not exactly like
us.

Not that long ago, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, noting that
the French had abolished slavery, yet the British had not, said: "The day may
come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never
could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. . The question
is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"

The questions for our generation, and for future generations,
are: "Who are animals, what are we doing to them, and should we change, no matter
how comfortable we may be in our old ways?'

Some members of our own species may have been to the moon, and
some can split the atom, but there are many ways in which human talents pale in
comparison to the animals'. This is not a competition, of course. We are all in
this together. In the same way that establishing women's rights or rights for
human minorities does not reduce men or white people, so facing up to our prejudices
toward other species does not reduce humans; rather, it allows society to keep
growing and expanding its ethical horizons, and individuals to become more compassionate,
rather than just being bigger bullies.

There is a lot to respect and admire about animals. Our own
military is still learning from dolphins, who use sonar not only to navigate,
but also to stun their prey, and from bats who can find their way in total darkness.
We cannot decipher animals' languages, but it is indisputable that they have them.
Monkeys have separate warnings to alert the troupe to a threat from the sky, such
as a hawk, and a threat from the ground, such as a poisonous snake. Prairie dogs
use different calls to signal the approach of a single human being, a friend,
and a foe. Whales sing their histories through the great oceans, adding new bits
of information every year. The tree frog drums his messages to others far away,
while other frogs "hear" with their skin. Elephants speak to each other across
many miles by using infrasound-powerful, deep rumbles at frequencies too low for
us to pick up-and mice also talk at frequencies inaudible to the human ear. Crows
are now known not only to play (in St. Petersburg, they have worn the paint off
the cathedral windows by sliding down them on their bottoms, just for fun), but
to have dialects. Birds from the South of France, for example, can't understand
birds of the same species from the North.

Animals use tools and have their own compasses. Ants fashion
boats out of leaves with which to cross rivers. Wasps make a home out of a wood
and sand mixture, as we make adobe huts. Orangutans in the rain forest, even very
young ones, choose the right size leaf to use as an umbrella. Rabbits and beavers
construct different rooms for sleeping, for food storage, and for waste. The humble
newt can "read" the Earth's pulsating electromagnetic field. While we may whine
if we miss a meal or two, the emperor penguin sits for up to 45 days on the ice
without an iota of food, guarding the egg that contains his successor. The tiny
desert mouse rolls a stone in front of her burrow to collect the dew so she can
drink water in the morning before the heat sets in. The turtle navigates by the
Earth's magnetic field, and starlings read the heavens for direction. It was an
albatross, not a man, who first circumnavigated the globe and knew the Earth was
round. As for family values, geese mate for life, and a male will risk hunters'
guns to stick by his injured wife when she is shot.

When people say, "But all that is just instinct," I wonder how
they think we human beings select our own mates, the people we love. Is it by
cold logic? And how do we know to keep clean or to teach our children to walk?
Our instincts are an integral part of us, yes, but all of us, from mice to cats,
think: the dog who heads excitedly for the door when she sees you putting on your
shoes and who relishes every moment of freedom; the bird who, seeing another bird
in a bit of a personal dilemma, lends a hand; and the cat mother who enters a
blazing home to rescue her kittens from a fire. From the extraordinary to the
ordinary, all these acts demonstrate that all animals think, whether in the same
exact ways or not.

We have all heard someone referring to criminal conduct say: "So and so behaved like an animal." The Spanish Child Welfare Society offers another
perspective on human vs. animal behavior in its television commercial that shows
a rhinoceros mother teaching her child how to avoid danger and other mothers instructing
their infants on grooming, bathing, and how to choose safe foods. The narrator
says, "For once, we're asking you to behave like animals!"

I was working for a humane society when I first started thinking
about animals in a different way. I was already familiar with the often-terrible
things that happen to dogs and cats and wildlife. People turn dogs and cats out
into the countryside to fend for themselves; they also stab, beat, and shoot them
and starve them to death on their chains at the far end of the yard. One afternoon,
a cruelty call took me to a barn littered with broken glass. A family had moved
away, leaving the animals behind. They were all dead except for one small pig.
I lifted him up and held him in my arms, then gave him his first drink of water
in perhaps a week. Then I bundled him off to the vet.

My job was to prosecute the people who had willfully caused
this small animal's suffering, so I made sure that I dutifully collected all the
evidence. But while driving home that night, I began to wonder what I could eat
for dinner. Ah, I thought, conducting a mental inventory of the contents of my
refrigerator, I have some pork chops. The penny dropped! I realized how inconsistent
it was of me to be preparing to charge someone with a crime for abusing one little
pig while paying someone else to hurt and kill the other little pig I was going
to eat for dinner.

I had never been to a slaughterhouse then, but, like most people,
I knew that such places must be appalling. Today, I can tell you firsthand about
the look in the eyes of the animals. As they are prodded and kicked along to their
death, they can smell and hear and see what is already happening to those in front
of them in the slaughter line. I have stood on the "kill floors" in slaughterhouses
for many different kinds of animals, including a slaughterhouse for dogs in China.
In the West, we are appalled by dog-eating, but of course no animals wish to be
killed, and all of them, dogs and chickens and pigs, struggle fiercely to avoid
the man with the knife. All are equally filled with fear.

It is perhaps awful to say, but the moment of death in the slaughterhouse
may be the best part of these animals' lives. I say that because to satisfy the
tastes of so many people who crave chicken wings and burgers, animals raised for
meat have a truly wretched existence. They are castrated and dehorned, have their
tails amputated and their beaks seared off with a hot wire, all without benefit
of anesthetics. Calves are separated from their loving mothers soon after birth
so that the milk meant for these baby animals can become cheese and ice cream
and the calf can be raised for veal. After weeks in darkness, the calves stumble
down the same ramp their mothers will walk when their lives are considered insufficiently
profitable. Animals on factory farms are crowded together in enormous numbers.
Pigs must breathe in the ammonia from their own waste, collected in troughs beneath
their pens. They suffer blackened lungs and have difficulty breathing, and their
limbs become infected with open sores from lying on the hard cement. Undercover
video footage shot by PETA shows pigs routinely clubbed with iron gateposts and
beaten to death with claw hammers. The lame are thrown in and out of the trucks,
and in bitter winter weather, the pigs' sensitive flesh freezes to the sides of
the metal truck body.

"Broiler chickens" are bred to be so top-heavy that the bones
in their legs splinter and they spend much of their lives in chronic pain. In
the egg factories, chickens can never stretch a wing or find room to lie down.
When their laying life is over, they are stuffed into crates so roughly that their
wings often fracture. The dying are afforded no care. Sometimes you may pass a
transport truck and see them looking out through the slats, their eyes filled
with despair. What we do to them is neither "civilized" nor humane.

In 1981, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals embarked
on its first investigation. One of us took a job in a laboratory in Silver Spring,
Md., where a group of macaque monkeys were kept. The monkeys had been taken as
babies from their homes and families in the Philippines. The nerves in their spines
had been cut, and this affected their ability to control their arms. The cages
in which they were kept were rarely cleaned; in fact, they were so filthy that
fecal matter rose to a height of a couple of inches in some places and fungus
grew on it. The experimenter didn't bother to give the monkeys food bowls, so
when their food was thrown into the cage, the pellets fell through the wire and
landed in the waste collection trays below. The monkey would have to pick the
food pellets out of these trays in order to eat. The animals' limbs were also
injured from getting caught in the rusted and broken cage wires, and the monkeys
had lost a great deal of their hair from malnutrition. The researcher had converted
a small refrigerator into a shock box; inside it, the monkeys were punished if
they failed to pick up objects with their damaged limbs.

We persuaded the police to do something unprecedented: to serve
a search warrant on the laboratory and remove the monkeys. Seeing the faces of
those monkeys turned up to the sunlight for the first time in many years as they
came out of the lab encouraged people to seek alternatives to animal use. Scientists
and laypeople wondered aloud whether it was morally right to experiment on animals
at all and whether, indeed, it was scientifically valid to do so. Some physicians,
upset that modern research methods were being neglected in favor of old-fashioned
animal-poisoning protocols, began clamoring for funding for human epidemiological
studies, the cloning of human skin, and computer technology that can bring quick
and directly applicable results.

When PETA started, most cosmetics, toiletries, and household
products such as oven cleaner were still tested on animals. Today, more than 550
product companies have switched to using human skin patch tests, computer assays,
and human corneas from eye banks, and from gathering guinea pig data to analyzing
human data. The arguments that animals must be used faded into oblivion because
consumers refused to buy the products until the companies changed.

The current challenge is to shift agencies, like the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, away from animal use. The most common toxicity tests still
in use take a substance, like weedkiller or mustard gas, the effects of which
we have long known from tragic human experience, and force-feed that substance
to rabbits. Researchers poison kittens with it and finally feed it to other primates.
No painkillers are given as substances like septic tank cleaner are smeared onto
the animals' abraded skin to see how much flesh they corrode, the results being
crudely recorded. Chemicals are also placed in animals' eyes and forced into animals'
lungs. When enough people protest, this will stop.

Since PETA formed, the role of animals in education, too, has
changed. Instead of cutting up frogs and piglets, many schools now use computer
programs or human anatomy lessons or take children outdoors to observe animals
in their natural setting, without intrusion. It can be inspiring to realize that
an animal digs a den without tools, stocks her larder without a supermarket, and
can tell what the weather will be by lifting her nose into the wind.

Today, medical students can use the Harvard Program, opting
to learn the skills of their profession on a simulator or alongside a skilled
practitioner in surgery. Because of lawsuits and protests, students are no longer
compelled to violate their ethical beliefs by watching the death throes of a poisoned
pig. Models now have lifelike "skin" that breathes, and software programs allow
students to start over if they inadvertently "kill" the virtual patient. As PETA's
message catches on, more people in all walks of life are beginning to embrace
the idea that animals are not disposable tools, but individuals who need protection.

Most people, when shown how their actions contribute to cruelty
and given options, will make compassionate choices. In the U.S. alone, while the
demand for cheap flesh results in more than 9 billion animals suffering for the
table each year-that's 1 million animals eaten every hour-the number of vegetarians
is growing rapidly.

I hope that someday there will be no elephants in circuses,
kept in shackles, beaten with bullhooks, and denied their family lives and their
freedom, all for a human being's few moments of odd enjoyment; that the leghold
trap and the fur farm will be outlawed the world over, as they already have been
in England and several other countries; that wonderful natural fibers and synthetics
will be chosen over leather; that responsible parents will raise their children
not to acquire the meat addictions of my generation, which have brought us heart
attacks, cancer, and stroke, as well as causing immense suffering for animals.
I hope that all the animal laboratories will have closed down and that it will
be illegal to keep any dog on a chain, shivering through the cold weather while
the families they long to interact with enjoy the warmth of their homes.

PETA's message is that each one of us is a vital player in life's
great orchestra. Every day, our choices perpetuate or stop needless violence.
I hope that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals will continue to be a
conduit for positive change, and I ask that you please join us in making the world
a less violent place for all living beings. Thank you.

∞Copyright: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Inc., 2001. All rights reserved.